The key to the management of identities, an agile Active Directory (AD) acts as a map between names and values. In comparison to native tools, it is easier and faster for addressing the auditing and security needs of an enterprise, along with ensuring workflow streamlining, providing business continuity and optimizing IT capabilities. In fact, the core to office automation is to provide a repository of directories that identifies all resources within a network and connects them to users and applications. Active Directory brings together resources, users, networks and access points, offering a platform to enable better management of users with departmental access to corporate services and business resources.
However, undertaking such access control over all enterprise applications and shared files could be a complex process. SailPoint, with its specialized identity solutions, such as IdentityIQ and IdentityNow, has been able to provide an apt solution. With the integration of SailPoint with Active Directory, enterprises are able to provision and de-provision accesses in a seamless manner across all applications, domains and files. Thus ensuring a secure and compliant hybrid IT environment.
Why integrate AD in SailPoint?
Managing identity profiles become easier with the integration of SailPoint with AD. It enables companies to control operational activities, such as password management, provisioning and de-provisioning accesses, with the help of a central dashboard. Such integration provides the following benefits:
- Centralized dashboard:Managing various domains, groups and users from a central point, including mailing users from a single dashboard.
- Quick access to users:Granting and revoking user accesses, including employee onboarding and offboarding in an automated and easier manner.
- Compliant accesses:Providing approval to access various applications as per the defined enterprise policies.
- Track changes:Getting alerts of any changes in the Active Directory, including policy changes, group changes, account lock, object actions, etc.
How to onboard multiple AD applications in SailPoint?
To create holistic identity governance, it is imperative to select appropriate systems and sequences for onboarding and deploying SailPoint products with multiple Active Directories. An organized approach for integration enables enterprises to achieve their end goal, which could be to prioritize infrastructure, plan a long-term roadmap or manage numerous directories. Here are some of the pertinent points to keep in mind while onboarding multiple AD applications in SailPoint:
Prioritizing AD applications: Creating a prioritized list is imperative when dealing with numerous target systems so that the implementation can be conducted seamlessly. Such prioritization is based on creating an evaluation system by analyzing risk indicators, data available in application inventory, regulatory requirements and identity governance policies. The metrics may also include other parameters such as creating groups as per categories like platform or department. Once the prioritization criteria are established, SailPoint integrates the applications as per the priority.
- Standardizing onboarding process:Integration requires a standardized process, which can be followed at both technical and enterprise levels. As onboarding multiple active directories could lead to complexities in the process, it is important to define the entire path from the initial stages of gathering requirements, designing the integration architecture, adopting factory-style onboarding process and well as testing or releasing the process in a phased manner. This will also enable the IT team to predict any possible challenges and address them proactively. While fulfilling the requirement of onboarding multiple applications in a uniform manner, such an approach also ensures that SailPoint is able to undertake quality integration of various applications on a large scale.
- Focusing on identity governance:Enterprises may face financial and reputation loss, along with increased requirements for auditing, in case of a successful hacking incident on Active Directory. In order to secure such target sources, companies need to implement technology that will provide them a transparent view of the various groups, users, activities, and resources associated with the directories. The core requirement is to minimize security risk while increasing compliance. This can be achieved by providing evidence of being compliant during the auditing of the systems, real-time monitoring and responses to activities, along offering holistic access governance to unstructured data. SailPoint ensures extending such identity strategies to help onboard multiple AD applications.
- Offering real-time alerts:Any possible risks or untrustworthy activities in the Active Directories need to be actively monitored and promoted to the admin for appropriate action. Such real-time alerts could be provided over email, alerting about activities such as suspicious access modification, remote actions, or any infrastructure-related changes, among others. These alerts enable admins to take timely actions to notify users, suspend accounts or create event-driven certifications. All these features could be enabled with SailPoint identity products.
- Providing permissions and undertaking analytics:Collecting and analyzing the privileges on the Active Directory ecosystem in an automated manner helps in understanding which user has access to what data, besides uncovering any violations or malpractices related to access management. With SailPoint identity solutions, enterprises are able to remedy any errors in Active Directory installations, which could have resulted in governance issues.
How Avancer can help?
Avancer strategically integrates Active Directory Management to bring value to existing network topology and protocols. It sets up a transparent system mechanism enabling users to access relevant resource. Some of the key features of Avancer’s Active Directory Management Solution’s integration include – Providing robust directory that authenticates users for any enterprise level application, proactive identity administration with integrated functionality, streamlined security permissions with a comprehensive view of containers and associated objects, intuitive reporting and alerting by filtering event, simple group policy management based on role, departments and access protocol, and Backup and Recovery through automated scheduling provisions.
